No-reference quality assessment of HEVC videos in loss-prone networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a no-reference quality assessment measure for high efficiency video coding (HEVC). We analyze the impact of network losses on HEVC videos and the resulting error propagation. We estimate channel-induced distortion in the video assuming we have access to the decoded video only without access to the bitstream or the decoder. Our model does not make any assumptions on the coding conditions, network loss patterns or error concealment techniques. The proposed approach relies only on the temporal variations of the power spectrum across the decoded frames. We validate our proposed quality measure by testing it on a variety of HEVC coded videos subject to network losses. Our simulation results show that the proposed model accurately captures channel-induced distortions. For the test videos, the correlation coefficients between the proposed measure and the fullreference SSIM values range between 0.70 and 0.80.

A regression-based framework for estimating the objective quality of HEVC coding units and video frames

“…Recently, work has been reported on the HEVC noreference SSIM quality assessment in the existence of transmission distortions and losses [28]. Six video sequences are used and the average correlation factor reported was 76.5%.…”

“…Shanableh / Signal Processing: Image Communication 34 (2015)[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] …”

Hierarchical-P Reference Picture Selection Based Error Resilient Video Coding Framework for High Efficiency Video Coding Transmission Applications

“…The design of the proposed hierarchical-P RPS algorithm is based on this configuration of HEVC. Regarding the feedback channel, the ACK-based system was chosen because it provides better error robustness than the NACK-based system especially when the feedback channel has some errors [3,8].…”

“…The high compression ratio of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) [1] helps for reducing the amount of the network traffic load and mitigates bandwidth demand. However, according to recent studies about the error robustness of HEVC in loss prone networks [2][3][4], HEVC encoded bit streams are very sensitive to packet errors and the quality of the decoded video is unacceptable for packet loss rates higher than 1%. Therefore, an effective error resilience framework is essential for HEVC video transmission.…”

Predicting full-reference video quality measures using HEVC bitstream-based no-reference features

“…Using a correlation analysis of NR measures compared to FR measures may allow for estimating the accuracy loss for a particular pair of FR and NR method. A variety of methods for NR quality estimation exist [1] but very few methods target High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) coded test stimuli; examples include bitstream-based [2] and pixel-based [3] approaches. It is required to enhance existing techniques as the methods developed for H.264/AVC coded videos may not be applicable to HEVC coded videos [4].…”